Paint Shop Pro tips for converting photos to black and white

Here are some Paint Shop Pro tips for adjusting colour in photos. The first thing to mention here is the difference between what is generally called "black and white photos" and the real meaning of this.

Below are three photos of me. The first is the basic colour version from the digital camera. The second is a real black and white photo. The colours are either black or white. The result is not very pleasing. The third is a greyscale version of the digital photo. This is what most people mean when they say "black and white photos".

So, this may be a new term for you. Your old "black and white" TV was actually a greyscale TV. It didn't just offer black or white but rather many shades of grey. So now when we are using any image editor we will be looking for the greyscale function.

Click on the video to see the Paint Shop Pro tips on how to do this conversion or scroll down the page for the text and picture version of the paint shop pro tips.

First, make sure you have a shortcut on your desktop to Paint Shop Pro, whatever image editing software you are using. If you haven't done this then go to Photo Album page for instruction on how to do it.

Then left click on the shortcut to open Paint Shop Pro

The program open and you get the grey blank screen

We have to open a picture to work with so we go to File and Browse

When you select Browse a navigation window opens asking you to locate the picture/photo you want to open. We need to locate the My Pictures folder. There will be a small + box to the left of the folder. This indicates that there are sub folders inside this folder. One left click will open these sub folders.

You then select the folder to open and thumbnail previews of the photos in the folder will appear. In the case below, I have selected the Camera Pics March 2008 folder.

I now select the photo I want to work with. The photo of the piano/library is the one I have selected below

The photo opens and I see it in all its glory. I want to turn it into greyscale so I go to Colour and then Greyscale

When I single left click on this option, the photo will become greyscale (black and white).

I then need to save the photo and be sure that I will be able to find it again. So I go to File and Save as. That opens a new window. I must give the photo a new name or else it will replace the colour version with the new greyscale version. I would like to keep both versions. I simply add the word "greyscale" to the name the colour version has. When I am ready, I click Save.

Finally, you will see in the preview window that there are now two versions of the photo, the original and the new greyscale version.

Paint Shop Pro Tips

When you open a photo, apart from just looking at it, you may want to zoom in on a section of the photo. Follow this paint shop pro zoom tool tutorial.

The photo may need to be rotated so that it can be viewed properly. We need to rotate photos to switch between portrait and landscape orientations. Click here to see a paint shop pro 5 tutorial on how to rotate digital photos

You may want to turn it form a colour to a black and white photo. Here are some paint shop pro tips on how to covert a photo to greyscale (black and white)

You may wish to edit out some part of the photo which you didn't intend to include. This is called cropping a picture and is an extremely handy skill to have. Follow these tutorials for paint shop pro to master the skill of cropping photos

You need to know how to resize your photos for email and the web. Here is the tutorial on resizing for photo sharing

Home